Chapter 23. Using Blogger

If you want to create your own personal blog, you have two ways to go. You can use blogging software to create a blog on your own website, using your own web hosting service. Alternatively, you can create a blog at one of the many blog hosting communities.

A blog hosting community is a site that offers easy-to-use tools to build and maintain your blog, and then does all the hosting for youtypically for free. Creating your own blog on one of these sites is as simple as clicking a few buttons and filling out a few forms. And once your blog is created, you can update it as frequently as you like, again by clicking a link or two.

Perhaps the most popular blog hosting community on the Web today is Blogger, which Google just happens to own. Now, you might think that Blogger has very little to do with Google's core competency in search technology, and you'd be right. But Blogger does offer Google lots of opportunities to sell advertising space, and as we've discussed throughout this book, that's how Google makes its money.

So, since Blogger is an important part of the Google empire, it gets covered in this book. It also helps that Blogger is very good at what it does, perhaps the best (and definitely the biggest) of all the blog hosting communities on the Web today. If you want to launch your own personal blog, you could do worse than use Blogger.